It can be appreciated that for a considerable period of time, livestock animals that are normally confined in stalls or pens or use a stall to get out of the weather have been provided with bedding material of natural straw. This bedding is provided to absorb the urine produced while the animal is confined, and to improve the comfort of the animal. Such stalls, whether using straw bedding, shavings or sawdust materials, naturally require frequent removal of the urine soaked material. As a consequence of this confinement there are also considerable manure deposits, which, by the activity of the animal walking around the stall, can become mixed with the bedding and scattered around the stall. This mixture of urine, manure and bedding must be frequently removed and replenished for the health of the animals and to reduce noxious odors.
When raising or keeping horses, the bedding may be cleaned several times a day or completely stripped and replenished daily or weekly. Thusly, the cost and storage of bedding materials, the extent to which it is lost when cleaning and the size of composting piles and their disposal are problems faced by all in the field. During the past few decades, in addition to straw, two additional types of bedding have come into fairly regular use. One common type is pine or cedar wood shavings or chips, either in bulk form or compressed and bagged. The other being sawdust or compressed sawdust pellets. Since shavings and sawdust or pellets have come into common usage and that they are smaller or finer in comparison to the long strands of straw, during the removal of bedding some sifting can take place. All the urine soaked bedding will be removed and the undisturbed piles of manure will be discarded whole. However, the movement of horses in their stall results in many manure piles being broken down into smaller component manure balls. The sifting of the bedding to separate the small manure pieces from the voluminous bed of shavings results in considerably less of the bedding material being thrown out with the manure.
Manual cleaning of horse stalls or other livestock facilities is typically performed utilizing a manure fork, which consists of a fork head configured with a row of plastic or metal tines. A handle typically made of wood having a circular cross-sectional shape is attached to fork head.
In conventional practice of stall cleaning, there is substantial waste because much of the wood shaving bedding material becomes removed and discarded along with the manure, thus necessitating frequent costly replenishment that can amount to many cubic feet of shavings per week per animal, representing a substantial cost and profuse disposal factor. The main approach presently available to control excess shavings disposal is to train, motivate and supervise workers to take the extra time and diligent effort to manually agitate the fork in a vigorous and tiring fashion to promote the separation of manure pieces from the bedding, thus reducing the quantity by salvaging the wood shavings; however such special training and effort is likely to be merely a tradeoff, shifting the cost to labor and supervision, and could result in zero or negative savings overall. The cost of wasted bedding material is particularly high in prestigious operations and expensive boarding sites where, except for their exercise periods, the horses are normally confined in a stall. These stalls must be kept in top condition by frequent cleaning and wood shavings are utilized plentifully for health as well as aesthetic and show purposes.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a motion assisted manure fork that can save time, fatigue and reduce waste by assisting the user with the separation of the shavings, sawdust, pellets or other bedding from the manure balls.